Talentism

The Battle We (I) Have Been Waiting For

Originally this piece was published on Recruiting.com. I thought it was a wee-bit controversial so I asked Jason to publish anonymously. He agreed (you can his great intro here). But after my post yesterday about the battle between HR and the CFO I thought it worthwhile resurrecting it and taking ownership. So here is the deathmatch we all (or at least I) have been waiting for...

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Hi, I’m Bob Anweave, and I’m here with you tonight as the World Work Federation brings you an exciting cage bout. Money meets people in a head-on-head collision to see who will rule the capitalist ring. We are coming to you live from Wall Street, New York City, with an exclusive look at two powers, one mighty, one not, but both with lots of history to claim the right of “Capitalist Master.” In the far corner we have the People team, composed of the frail HRdini and the mighty Talentismo. And in front of us, wearing green silks and eye shades is team money: the diabolical CFOinster and his malevolent henchman, the Dark Lord of Treasury.

What do you think will happen here tonight Dave?

Dave: It’s not even a contest Bob. CFOinister and the Dark Lord of Treasury have been clubbing every corporate function team then have come up against. They left team IT reeling with their famous thoughtless over the shoulder “cost cutter” maneuver. The only team that looks like they can beat these demons is legal, and they are demanding that the World Work Foundation let them join team money. I would have to say this contest is money’s to lose Bob!

No Announcement... Yet

Last week I said that I would make a big announcement on Friday. And then Friday came and went and nothing happened.

I can’t make the announcement yet, but I will say that the substance is “I will be doing my recruiting-centric blogging for a great new blog that is going to launch soon” and leave it at that. Hopefully I will be able to announce more specifics after labor day. Until that time …

Corporations: Up a Tree

Ever used a really big software package? You know, an SAP or Peoplesoft? If you are a software junkie then you end-up continually frustrated. The code is bloated and convoluted and just plain overly complex. The software junkie compares the 1K lines of code they developed to solve the same problem that the big, bad software does with 1M and start to wonder “How can anybody buy this junk?"

Think about it long and hard enough and you will probably come to the decision that people are just dumb. Dumb management hires dumb people to make dumb products that dumb users break and call dumb customer service reps to ask dumb questions and get dumb answers. It is a field day for the cynic.

Problem is, your conclusion will be wrong. There just aren’t enough dumb people in the world to explain all the dumb things that go on inside of organizations. Even if you buy into a dystopian vision of greedy idiots scaling the corporate ladder to inflict pain and suffering on millions of employees and customers, you have to wonder why so many employees and customers stick around with so many options at their fingertips. Easy (you say): they don’t know they have options or they are scared.

Want to Reduce Turnover? Turn your Employees into Brand Talent!

It is increasingly difficult to separate the act of finding great talent from the act of keeping great talent. In many ways it is a math problem: there aren’t enough people out there to replace the people you are losing. Reducing voluntary turnover is turning out to not only be the most cost-effective recruiting program you have, but maybe the only option left to you.

As recruiting managers come to this “ah-ha!” moment, they inevitably turn to the option of employee loyalty programs. The idea is simple: if you give the right rewards and say the right things then employees will stay around. It’s just like selling detergent: make it cheaper and sexier and people will overlook that your clothes don’t get clean. Fortunately people value their work experience more than they value their cleaning products, so the average consumer marketing cons aren’t going to work.

Loyalty programs will have decreasing effectiveness because the days of blind commitment to a company are done. In the past a company was an embodiment of a principle: security. Employment was rewarded independent of the value someone contributed, so you could be loyal to a company because they would be loyal to you. No longer. Too many employers view talent as a cog in the economic wheel: less valuable than the money and machinery, more valuable than the lobby décor. Many employees see an employer as an abstraction consisting of institutional shareholders wagging the dog that is management. Whether these perceptions are warranted or not is besides the point: it is the reality of our world. The days of executives taking a hit from Wall Street because they want to keep their employees around is a rare event indeed.

Employee loyalty programs have been a small but key contribution to this tsunami of cynicism. Management credibility is paid in the coin of authenticity, and nothing feels more contrived than an “attaboy!” followed by increased work hours, lousy bosses and decreased wages. Piecemeal changes to the relationship with employees won’t turn this situation around. It really does take a radical new approach.

The Most Unkindest Cut

I returned home from a wonderful vacation in Hawaii and immediately turned to my two favorite reading fixes: Recruiting.com and Interbiznet. I was shocked (shocked I tell you!) to find that Jason Davis put up a post with a list of active blogs from which Talentism was excluded! Oh the horrors, the agony! Woe is me!

To quote my friend Bill (Shakespeare) “This was the most unkindest cut of all.” Of course getting cut from a list of blogs isn’t the same as being stabbed by Brutus, but it did serve as a needed wake-up call that in the blogging world, it’s all about the length of time between your posts, not the length of posts when you have the time.

Suitably indignant I started writing a pledge to my several readers that I would once again take up the mantle of recruiting blogger extraordinaire, but then I started watching a rerun of Boston Legal and lost my train of thought. I think that Alan Shore and Denny Crane are archetypes and I keep trying to figure out which once I am: aged pompous blowhard or young pompous contrarian. What were we talking about? Oh yeah… Jason cut me from the list! Time to post about that (but maybe I should throw caution to the wind and get that law degree….).

Actually, I had written the excuse for my lack of blogospheric presence three weeks ago, but it doesn’t get posted until Friday, so here I am left alone with my indignity and a box of Ding-Dongs. I do have an exciting announcement to make (and no, it’s not that I actually yearn to be Shirley Schmidt), but alas it will have to wait until later in the week.

Until that time I shall take Jason’s omission as a kind-hearted nudge to produce more content, and not as the churlish slight that my “Just-because-your-paranoid-doesn’t-mean-they-aren’t-out-to-get-you” shadow-self would like to believe.

Back to the TV! I go alone! (I don't suppose anybody remembers Kevin Spacey's appearance on LA Law in 1992, so that quote will not be quite as funny as I hoped.)

PS – Apologies to those of you who don’t watch Boston Legal. I highly recommend it as a guilty pleasure.

 

Markets not Managers: Redux

What is a business person? More specifically, what is a business person today, in the creative age? There are many definitions, but let me be so bold as to put one forward here:

A business person is someone who allocates resources (money, time, raw materials) to create the maximum possible sustainable return (value) on resources invested (value).

Put another way, a business person is someone who creates more value than they use (cost), and does so in a way that be continued over time. “Sustainable” must be part of our definition of a business person because it encompasses concepts of ethical behavior, interconnected systems consciousness and “true cost / benefit analysis”, most of which seem to be lacking from modern corporate systems.

Principles of Talentism: Part 12 (Final) - Operate from True Cost

A year ago some friends were talking about big issues like “How to save the world.” Brian started his career as a business person (an engineer at a Silicon Valley company to be exact) and then went back to school to be an environmentalist. He is an intelligent and thoughtful person, so he asked the question: “How do we get the environmental community working with the business community, instead of against it?”

I was probably (certainly) a little inebriated, and in that state it doesn’t take much to get me to hold forth (come to think of it, I do it when I am sober too). So I said “First, you need to get shareholders to understand that all pollution is the direct result of converting their capital into things that bring them no value, and in fact hurt them. Pollution is waste, and waste is something that all companies must seek to reduce all the time. Getting shareholders fixated on how the smoke coming out of the chimney is quite literally their money being burned because management couldn’t figure out a way to put that stuff to use and you will start to get some traction with business.” (That’s not the point of this article, but I thought I would get that out there all the same.)

Not to be stopped, with all around the table scratching their heads and wondering who would be the first to volunteer to get some coffee, I offered a solution that met with immediate scorn, and which subsequently everyone at the table has admitted could really solve some big problems: true cost.

Google This: I am not having Brad Pitt's Love Child

All those who labor over their blogs either learn or intuit a few simple guidelines about their endeavor:

1. Post frequently.
2. Write stuff that matters to you and your audience.
3. Be consistent in style, presentation and intent.
4. Be fresh and engaging.

This all makes sense. Blogging is supposed to be a conversation, not a diatribe, a community instead of a hermitage. So you gotta keep 'em coming back for more.

After 173 posts comprising over 500 pages of original content (in essence, after writing a book in public) I have learned all those lessons first hand. I can watch my traffic numbers spike and dive as I employ (or forget) those maxims.

But those "guidelines" can also be creativity killers. Having to stay on top of a post every day, or every couple of days, really does me in. People like Sumser and Dubs and Jason are just so damn good at it that it is easy to forget that it is almost super-human to create fresh, interesting and relevant content frequently and consistently.

Today I am going to put up three posts: this one and two others. This one is short and quick and will probably get some traction. The other two are long, drawn-out and boring and will be read only by B-school shut-ins who really don't care but need to look smart in their next Porter class. I should break these two longer posts into little nuggets and be pithy and irreverent, but I really don't have the time, and while I am here and engaged, I want to get all this stuff up and online (and forget about it).

I wouldn't have considered this 4 months ago, but a significant stint of radio silence on my part, coupled with some rigorous analysis of my site traffic, leads me to the conclusion that a significant part of the value that I am adding to the blogosphere (if there is any) is that my articles are crawled and indexed and available when people type in a search on Google (and sometimes Yahoo). It's not as sexy as having a regular readership, and it certainly fails in the area of building a conversation and a community, but at this point being Googled is about the best I can do.

Keywords: sex, Tom Cruise weds Brad Pitt, Britney Spears gives birth to Brad Pitts illegitimate love child, did I say sex yet?, Angelina Jolie, naked

Thanks for reading!

Principles of Talentism: Part 11 - Consultants, not Accountants

(Continuing with the long running and often tortured series about the "Principles of Talentism". Hang in there, we're almost done.)

If you are in a P&L that delivers services then you need to learn how to be a consultant. In fact, spending time as a consultant is something that everybody in corporate America should do at least once in their career.

We need to separate the practice of consulting from it’s standard implementation. Consultants usually exist inside of consultancies, and consultancies, like all other businesses, exist to make money. Since consultancies make their money by finding things that are wrong and pointing them out to a client who may be otherwise blissfully unaware of the issue, consultancies are structurally doomed to be reviled by their clients and the clients employees. The fact that many consultancies make money by finding things that are perfectly OK, or could be repaired by someone internally, and then pointing them out to the client as not only broken, but only fixable by the consultancy themselves, further tarnishes the luster of the profession.

But we are not talking about the business of consulting here. So let’s acknowledge that “consultants” get a bad name for reasons both real and imagined and talk about what being a consultant is all about.

Good consultants do three things very well: ask insightful questions to gain deeper understanding, listen for opportunity and identify the real problem. By comparison, most business people spend time primarily as accountants: count the problems and cost them.